US sends fleet of warships to Korea

It's not the diplomacy-minded former president who is ready to
spy, it's the secretive nuclear submarine named for him. The
surveillance and attack capabilities it's supposed to have could
keep the tense situation on the Korean peninsula from spiraling out
of control.

A statement from the Navy's Seventh Fleet, which patrols the
western Pacific, says the drill was planned before the "unprovoked"
North Korean attack, but will demonstrate "the strength
of the [South Korea]-US Alliance and our commitment to regional
stability through deterrence." In other words: to stave off another
attack, not to initiate a retaliation.

The George Washington aircraft carrier is equipped with
75 planes and around 6,000 sailors. But it's not coming alone.
It's got the destroyers Lassen,
Stethem
and Fitzgerald with
it, and the missile cruiser Cowpens in tow.
Rumor also has it that the carrier strike group will link up with
another asset in area: The undersea spy known as the Jimmy
Carter, which can monitor and potentially thwart North Korean
subs that might shadow the American-South Korea exercises.

According to plugged-in naval blogger Raymond Pritchett, word's
going around Navy circles that the first surveillance assets that
the United States had in the air over yesterday's Korean island
battle were drones launched from the Jimmy Carter.

"North Korea couldn't detect the USS Jimmy Carter short
of using a minefield, even if they used every sonar in their entire
inventory," Galrahn writes. That'll matter in case North Korea
decides to launch another torpedo attack from a submarine, as it
did in March to sink the South Korean corvette Cheonan.

It carries Navy SEALs to slip into enemy ports undetected. And
its class of subs have 26-and-a-half-inch-diameter torpedo tubes,
wider than the rest of the submarine fleet, in case the
Carter has to take out rival ships. "That's a Seawolf, the
most powerful attack sub in the world," says Robert Farley, a
maritime and international-relations scholar at the University of
Kentucky.

All that might be intended to keep the North Koreans from trying
something during the exercises, scheduled to run from December 3
through 10. As bellicose as they've been this year, they'd be up
against a carrier strike group on the lookout for North Korean
aggression.

The North's 10 Yeono-class midget submarines -- tiny subs with a crew of
only a few sailors designed mostly for firing torpedoes -- is "only
mildly more capable than the submarines the Nazis were using in
1945," Farley says, but "if there's a nervous or adventurous North
Korean sub skipper out there, we could have a real problem."

The real role of the George Washington's carrier strike
group is floating diplomacy and deterrence, signaling "the close
security cooperation between our two countries, and to underscore
the strength of our Alliance and commitment to peace and security in the region," as the White
House's account of a phone call between the US and South Korean
presidents last night put it.